We Paid Off Our Mortgage 10 Times Faster Than Normal

Many people don’t even think of paying off their mortgage early. Or if they do consider it, they decide not to based on a couple of commonly held beliefs: that it’s good to keep a mortgage “for the tax deduction” or that it’s better to “invest instead”.

The thing is, neither of those beliefs are necessarily true. You can both invest and pay off your mortgage, and many people don’t get any tax benefits at all from having a mortgage. We sure didn’t.

So we decided to go ahead and pay off our $95,106 loan amount.

Once we really got started, it took us 3 years of focused effort to pay off our house.

Those 3 years were after we’d already spent years slowly but surely paying off all our other debt first. (Credit cards, my student loan, my husband’s car loan, a home improvement loan, etc.)

How did we pay off our mortgage so quickly?

I’ll answer the normal questions below (technical stuff plus where we got the money), but first let me say this:

Things that made the process go faster

A couple things did speed the process up a tiny bit, so I’ll go over those here too.

But really, NOTHING helped us pay off the mortgage early as much as prioritizing and staying focused on our goal. Those are the most important things, by far.

We didn’t have a 30-year mortgage.

We initially took out a 20-year mortgage. So maybe it was a mindset thing even then: we didn’t want to owe on the house forever, and 30 years kinda felt like forever.

Having a shorter mortgage term helps, because the shorter the term, the less interest you’ll pay overall.

(You can get a good idea of how much principal and interest you’ll pay for various lengths in one of these mortgage calculators. Or in my debt app, if you’ve got that.)

Refinancing for a shorter term and lower interest rate

We also refinanced a few times before getting serious about paying it off. (Once we even refinanced to get cash out for home improvements, which I totally regret. Ugh! Clearly that was pre-debt payoff.)

And before we even started tackling the mortgage, we refinanced to get an even shorter loan term (a 15-year mortgage) and to get an even better mortgage rate. Lower interest rates DO speed things up when it comes to paying off a mortgage. Then when we were less than a year away from paying off the house, we refinanced one more time for an even better interest rate.

Those last 2 refinances were through Pentagon Federal Credit Union. We went with them because they were having a deal at the time where you could get a TRUE no-cost refinance. Those are super rare. Refinances almost always cost you something (sometimes quite a bit!) so if you’re considering doing the same you’ll want to make sure it’s truly worth it.

I’m putting this here because we did do it, and people often ask about it, but again, it’s not what made the biggest difference. Changing our mindset and prioritizing did.

Now let’s talk about how we actually went about paying off the mortgage, technically speaking.

Ready to get out of debt?

It all starts with a Debt Mindset Reset.

Enter your email now to take the (free!) 7-day email course. (You'll also get useful tips and ideas each week to help you stay motivated!)

Making the payments

The technical details of paying off our mortgage were pretty simple. We first checked to make sure it didn’t have any prepayment penalties. We also made sure we were allowed to make as many mortgage payments as we wanted each month.

Then that’s exactly what we did: We threw as many dollars at the mortgage as we could, as often as we could. We made our extra mortgage payments online and designated them as “principal only”. (That’s important, since otherwise the extra money would have just gone to reduce the following month’s payment amount instead of reducing the balance owed.)

Some months we sent in as many as 8 payments: our “standard” monthly payments of the minimum plus $35, and then other random amounts.

We also obsessed over our progress, tracking how far we’d come and playing out various future scenarios using my Pay Off Debt app. When you’re getting out of debt, obsession is good.

When it came time to make the final payment, we called and got our mortgage payoff amount (since interest is calculated daily) and then sent in the required amount. Seeing that zero balance was worth all the time and effort.

So where’d we get the money to pay off the mortgage early?

We got the money from our regular full-time jobs, taking on extra work, doing odd jobs, working nearly full-time in my side business in addition to my regular job, doing $3-$5 surveys, etc. In short, from anywhere and everywhere we could think to bring in money.

I know there are people who will think “oh, if I made in [fill in whatever number sounds like a lot to you], I could pay off my house too!” or “oh, but I live in a high cost of living area and my mortgage is a whole lot more so this doesn’t apply to me” — but if you’re thinking either of those things, you’re missing the point.

Yes, it can be a huge struggle just to get by at all – let alone to pay off debt – if you’re making very little money. (I’ve been there — having spent a few years living WAY below the poverty level.) And yes, things are more expensive in a high cost of living area.

But you can be in or out of debt regardless of how much money you make right now, and you can pay off your home (and get out of other debt) regardless of where you live or how much you’re starting with.

Because it’s about what you do with your money that matters most. There are rich folks who declare bankruptcy, and there are people who become millionaires on a tiny salary.

How you can do it too

If you’re in a high cost of living area with a more expensive mortgage, maybe it will take you longer to pay off your house. But you can still do it if you want to. And the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll finish.

Maybe you’re barely making minimum wage right now, or you don’t have a job. Things don’t have to stay that way forever. You could ask for a raise, look for a better job, or work odd jobs. (See this post on making extra money for a list of ideas.)

The bottom line is: you can do things to change your current situation if you don’t like it. That may mean making some unpleasant choices, and it will probably take time. It did for us.

We all love to hear about the overnight success story, but the truth is that an overnight success is usually preceded by years of hard work and struggle. Years that are WORTH IT.

So know that every little bit helps.

You don’t have to start out all wild and crazy in order to pay off debt, or have some high-powered job. You just have to start with one change. Our initial goal was to “Pay a minimum of $35 extra per month toward the mortgage”. So we did that much at first, even though it didn’t feel like much. Later, we were able to kick it into high gear. We had more money because we’d paid off our other debt, gotten raises, worked extra, etc.

Once YOU start seeing progress — even if it’s just a little bit of progress — you’ll want to go further. It’s kind of like when you finally lose that first 5 pounds. It feels good, and so you keep at it.

Bottom line for us? We paid off the last $49,500 of our mortgage in less than a year. From a starting point of $35 a month to an ending point of $49,500 in a year is quite a change, but hockey-stick shaped progress is NOT uncommon for folks who have gotten out of debt.

What it takes to get out of debt

Finally, if you wish you could pay off debt (whether that’s your mortgage or any other kind of debt) you’ve got to start by doing something that’s not as obvious as it might sound:

You’ve got to quit borrowing money.

That was by far the biggest step we took in our whole get-out-of-debt journey. And it was the hardest thing to do, in retrospect.

We get so used to using debt for everything — emergencies big and small, things we forgot, stuff we want — that the idea of getting by without it doesn’t even seem realistic.

But it is.

Get creative instead

To quit borrowing money, you have to save money to build up an emergency fund, track your spending, and budget. Not borrowing will probably mean waiting on some purchases, and looking for other ways to buy or borrow things you need. You might even have to do without some things you initially thought you needed.

Once you get the first debt or two paid off, you’ll have more money, which makes everything easier. Things will cost you less, because you won’t be paying interest on top of the purchase price. You’ll feel more satisfied, because instead of sending your money off to your creditors, you’ll get to CHOOSE what you want to do with it.

Becoming debt free — including your house — is totally doable, even if you can’t see exactly how to get out of debt yet. As long as you’re willing to do what it takes and you stick with it, you’ll get there.

Ready to get out of debt?

It all starts with a Debt Mindset Reset.

Enter your email now to take the (free!) 7-day email course. (You'll also get useful tips and ideas each week to help you stay motivated!)

Great post! We are focused and working hard to pay off our mortgage early. We’ve had our house (and mortgage) for 3.5 years. We’ve paid off just over half and hope to pay off the last half in the next two years. We would love to do it even faster, but we will see. :) Thank you for the inspiration!

Thanks for posting this, it’s a great inspiration. I found myself thinking exactly what you predicted: “I live in SF so there is no way I could pay off a mortgage early.” But hearing how you started small and were able to build the snowball makes me think twice about it!

Chewing away at an elephant a bite at a time, eh? We’ve been shrinking our mortgage through refinancing (who knew rates would get so low?) and now we’re just throwing everything at it. I have 4 young boys. When any of them jumps on a piece of furniture they know to expect me to shout, “No Jumping on the couch! We aren’t getting any new furniture until this house is paid off!” We’ve set a goal of Dec. 31st, 2016 to kill our mortgage. Reading your article has given me fresh inspiration to do all that I can to help. Thanks!

Great post and congratulations! My wife and I just have one rental property left to pay off. I did some calculations and decided to invest the extra money instead of using it to pay off the mortgage. Once we have the amount in our investment account to pay off the mortgage, we will pull it out and pay it off.

This works for us, because we are in a low tax bracket so we won’t pay taxes on our capital gains. And since we are using index funds, the process is easy. We will get a better return than we would save by paying the mortgage directly.

If something happens to the market, we will just wait until it goes back up. We’re not investing in extremely high risk stocks, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

That being said, occasionally I get excited and throw a few dollar directly towards the mortgage. The goal is to get it paid off. How we get there doesn’t really matter as long as we get there.

Very insightful! I especially though that the part about people using their mortgage interest for tax advantages was great. I see so many people (I’m an accountant) who do this, but it really doesn’t help them! Great post and congratulations!

We don’t have any debt but we are trying to save $10,000 this year in addition to multiple medical bills we know we will have and pay for installed wood floor that we desperately need. That $10,000 is more than 20% of my hubby’s take home pay (single income family of 5) but we are determined to do it and then begin matching his jobs 401k and paying down our mortgage in 2017. Thank you for sharing your journey! It is inspiring. We hope to share our journey and inspire others as well.

They were from https://www.pineconeresearch.com/ — I’m not sure if they still pay cash directly though or not, sounds like they’ve moved to points that can then be redeemed for cash. If I remember right they took maybe 15 minutes.

Hi Rachel, it’s been a few years since I did them, but yes they were legit :) If I remember right it was maybe once a week? I think they’ve changed how they do things since then so just check their website to see.

Like the post, but how do you figure that paying off a mortgage faster is financially better than keeping some money in stocks? Assuming the average interest for mortgage is 5% or less and the s&p will earn on average 7% per year.

Well, it’s not an either or proposition. It’s certainly possible to pay off your mortgage AND invest. (And that’s what we did.) Not having a mortgage has also freed up a bunch of money every month.

The problem with assuming a certain rate of return in the stock market is that while you can assume all kinds of things, there’s no guarantee it’ll actually turn out that way. (In my experience life rarely does.)

Another thing to consider is downsizing. A big house is nice. Many people live in a house bigger then they really need, we are all a custom to buying the biggest house we can. But if you live in a house that cost 250k sell it and buy one that cost 150k. That’s an immediate 100k plus intrest you don’t have to pay and gives you more money to pay off that mortgage. That’s what we’re currently doing.

Congratulations on being mortgage free! Your story sound very similar to ours. We waivered for years but as soon as we had focus we were able to get our mortgage paid in about 3 years. Living in a low cost of living area also helps!